Bulgarian American Credit Bank

Improves the security of its ICT infrastructure

Overview

The Bulgarian American Credit Bank (BACB) offers a full range of banking products and services to individual and corporate clients at competitive and high-quality service levels. BACB is a modern, high-technology institution that constantly meets the ever-growing expectations of consumers and quickly adapts to the changing environment of the banking sector, making intelligent use of innovations in advanced technologies to ensure that clients receive cutting-edge solutions and services.

In this specific project, the bank demonstrated its flexibility and initially deployed Deep Security’s anti-malware module only, but has planned the next steps as it seeks to upgrade its IT security solution by implementing the Intrusion Prevention/Virtual patching module by the end of the year.

The first step was to implement Deep Security – a package that protects virtualized systems without installing an agent on each virtual machine. The logs from all of the Trend Micro products are collected by the Trend Micro™ Control Manager™, so that each event in the infrastructure is tracked and monitored. The Control Manager was configured to send the consolidated log information to the existing security information and event management (SIEM) system.

The integrated DLP solution played an important role when choosing Trend Micro. Instead of having different products to protect different elements of the entire IT Infrastructure, Trend Micro proposed an integrated approach. There is an integrated DLP functionality (iDLP) in the products that protect the main vectors – the mail gateway, web gateway, end points, mail servers, and fileservers. The integrated DLP functionality can ensure full compliance with PCI/DSS standards in minutes by using existing templates, thus avoiding months of document classification, system adjustments, and staff training to recognize wrongly blocked documents.

Challenges

Like every business, the Bulgarian American Credit Bank (BACB) constantly faces the challenge of increasing cyber threats to its organization, but as a banking institution it must be extremely sensitive to any possible security issues. The threats it faces vary from traditional viruses and worms to sophisticated persistent threats and targeted attacks. BACB required comprehensive protection of its end points, servers, mail and web traffic, as well as cloud and virtual infrastructures. In order to continue to offer fast and high-quality services to its customers, the bank must ensure non-interrupted data processing and business continuity, as well as guarantee the functionality of its core systems and maximum security of its systems.

"We undertook a comprehensive analysis of possible solutions concerning overall IT security and the respective options for central management and monitoring. We searched for a solution that was able to incorporate all of our systems and provide centralized management and an easy connection to our SIEM solution ."

Dimiter Kehayov,Head of ICT and Virtual Bank Division

BACB’s IT Directorate team had previously successfully undertaken several projects with regard to ICT infrastructure renewal, platforms development, and new services & channels implementation, and now aimed to analyze and improve the system’s security levels to ensure that it was able to repel today’s most advanced and sophisticated threats.

Why Trend Micro

To analyze the current security status of the corporate network, the company carried out proof of concept tests of the bank's IT infrastructure using Trend Micro Deep Discovery’s dedicated appliances - Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector and Trend Micro Deep Discovery Analyzer. At the time of the tests, different platforms and solutions were used to protect end users, the mail-gateway, web-gateway, e-mail, Microsoft Share Point, Microsoft Lync, servers, mobile devices, and virtual infrastructure based on VMware.

“We undertook a comprehensive analysis of possible solutions concerning overall IT security and the respective options for central management and monitoring. We searched for a solution that was able to incorporate all of our systems and provide centralized management and an easy connection to our SIEM solution", said Dimiter Kehayov, Head of ICT and Virtual Bank Division.

As a result of a comprehensive search to find an holistic solution for protecting the entire IT Infrastructure, the IT Directorate team chose Trend Micro - a proven global leader in the field of IT security that was able to cover the bank’s whole spectrum of needs.

Solution

Based on an overall assessment of the existing solutions and the results of the analysis of the bank infrastructure and banking systems, a complete solution for IT security and the protection of all valuable assets of the bank was chosen – the Trend Micro Smart Protection Complete Suite and the Trend Micro Deep Security package for protection of the virtual infrastructure of the bank.

Trend Micro Deep Security establishes a reliable protection of physical, virtual and cloud servers and workstations. The solution is based on a module principle and has four main modules: Anti-malware (antivirus, firewall, web-reputation), Intrusion Prevention (with Virtual Patching included), and Integrity Monitoring and Log Inspection. Taken together, the overall package provides comprehensive protection and is broad enough to comply with the wide spectrum of regulations and standards in the field of IT security, and also provides the user with the flexibility to plan and execute its security program in separate stages.

Results

Having successfully completed this project, BACB has significantly increased the level of protection of its IT infrastructure and improved the quality of employees’ work and customer service levels. At the same time, data security has increased greatly and the bank will be able to enjoy a significant decrease in potential expenses related to the support of heterogeneous protection systems. The presence of an integrated environment for central monitoring and management plays an important role in mitigating and responding quickly to incidents, and the entire IT environment can be managed with a minimum of effort.